Unfair but balanced commentary on tax and budget policy, contemporary U.S. politics and culture, and whatever else happens to come up

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Very sad news (re. Marvin Chirelstein)

I was greatly saddened to hear today of the death of
Marvin Chirelstein. Marvin was my tax
(and Corporate Finance) professor at Yale Law School back in the day – I never
took a course with Bittker, who was reputed to dislike having to deal with
students’ vastly lesser state of intellectual attainment (both in tax and
generally) than his own.

My intellectual inspiration in tax didn’t really come
from Marvin – mainly through my own fault; at that stage I wasn’t very
receptive to the Yale law professors’ intellectual interests. Combination of burnout (I had gone straight
through from nursery school to law school without a break) with disdain,
at that callow stage in my personal development, for non-Ph.D. academic disciplines (I
had planned until late junior year to go to history grad school). But he had very few peers at the time in tax law scholarship.

Marvin was, however, by far my favorite professor at YLS. I (along with all of my best friends among the students there) admired his humor, personality, and panache as a performer (if panache, rather than
anti-panache, is the word for his brilliantly low-key comic style). We all thought he was extremely cool - not an accolade that we extended, at the time, to many YLS faculty members, or, for that matter, to many people who were older than, say, John Lennon and Bob Dylan.

Word had it that he had been associated with the
people in the Second City Theater Group in Chicago during the Nichols and May era, but didn’t formally join the troupe due to
stage fright. I honestly don’t know if that
was true. But he used to pace around nervously
before class, sucking on a cigarette and narrowing his eyes, very much in his own head like a
performer getting ready. And, true or
not, it was credible, because he was so hilarious in his distinctive style. I thought of him, at the time, as a combination
of Humphrey Bogart and Rodney Dangerfield.
I might now add, also with a touch of Stephen Wright.

Here is another story I heard about Marvin at the
time, which I doubted was true but actually did later confirm. Supposedly, when he was a student at the
University of Chicago Law School, taking tax with my own subsequent mentor
Walter Blum, two things became clear to Walter.
The first was that Marvin was intellectually gifted, and the other was
that he was cutting a lot of classes, apparently because he detested the early
morning meeting time. Walter called
Marvin into his office to discuss this, and Marvin made him the following
offer: “How about you let me attend or not as I see fit, and if I get at least
an A- on the exam you give me an A, but if I don’t, you fail me / lower my grade
to a C” [I forget which]. I assumed that this story couldn’t actually be true, but when I asked Walter about it years later, he
confirmed it.

Here are a few examples of Marvin’s comic style in
class. Disclaimer: You had to be there,
it was a totally personal style that worked via his delivery and the character
he played.

1) Marvin: “Feldman, this case says something about ‘old
and cold.’ What’s the opposite of ‘old
and cold’?

Student: “Uh, hot and fresh?”

Marvin. “Hot
and fresh … hot and fresh … I would have said young and warm. Shame on you, Feldman. You’re thinking about bagels.”

2) Student in the back: “Can you speak up? We can’t hear you.”

Marvin: “Sometimes people don’t speak softly because they’re unaware. Sometimes it’s because
they’re so ashamed of what they’re saying.”

3) [To a student]: “Would you be able to defend this
transaction? … For a fee, of course.”

4) [Discussing a case that was decided in 1935.] “Ah, 1935.
The best year of my life. The
Cubs won the pennant, and a boxer from my hometown became middleweight
champion.” He followed this with a toneless little laugh. What made this funny, to
Chirelstein aficionados such as myself, was the implicit suggestion that the point wasn’t that these things were
so great, but rather that the rest of his life was so completely lacking in anything better. But I should note that we didn’t think he was actually unhappy - rather, it was the character he played, like Jack Benny pretending to be cheap. Indeed, if anything we figured he had to be confident and secure in his life, in order to be willing to pretend that he felt pathetic.

5) [Explaining why he wasn’t using Bittker’s casebook,
in a year when Bittker was on leave and out of town.] “He’ll never know. He’s currently sailing down the Nile with a rose
between his teeth.”

Whenever I saw Marvin in subsequent years, he would
make a point of commenting on how awful my handwriting was on the exams I took
in his classes. He complained that it had permanently worsened his vision, and that surely I must have a physiological problem. He also called me “young
Shaviro,” well past the point when it was descriptively accurate. And he would complain that I was publishing too
much, pretending to demand that I stop so he wouldn’t look bad.

Early in my time at the University of Chicago Law
School, I got a handwritten card from Marvin in which he suggested
that I visit Columbia Law School. He
assured me that the head of the Appointments Committee, “Smiling Jack Coffee,”
would be happy to extend a visiting offer.
Why not try New York, he wrote.
It has crime, dirt, and vermin – what more could you want?

I’ll greatly miss Marvin Chirelstein, a brilliant and
wonderful man whom I admired and wish I could see again.

1. One day he began pacing, staring at the window, pacing, and staring at the window. Finally, he stopped. "It's a bit warm here," he said. "Do you think you could open the window."

The window was opened. A few minutes later he stopped again, with a worried, pained look on his face. "It's now a bit cold, don't you think?" he said. The window was closed.

Another few minutes went by and his expression grew pained and sad. "I am so embarrassed to say this, but again, it seems to be getting warm."

"Why don't you take off your jacket, Professor Chirelstein?" one student asked.

"Oh, I couldn't do that," he replied. I'm not wearing anything underneath." He paused and pointed to his shirt. "This is just a dickey."

2. I was taken out to a recruiting dinner with Marvin and other members of the Columbia faculty. He ordered a drink and one young faculty member who had recently clerked on the Supreme Court said "That's Justice Kennedy's favorite drink."

Marvin looked at him blankly. "Who?"

"Justice Kennedy,"

Marvin squinted at the guy.

"Justice Kennedy," the fellow said again.

"Canny?" Cannery?" asked Marvin.

"No, Justice Kennedy. Justice Anthony Kennedy," came back the reply

"Oh", said Marvin. I stopped keeping track after Pitney."

Later another faculty member began expounding his "gate keeping" theory of bar associations.

Marvin looked his usual glum self, and, after a while, his face grew even more pained.

At one point the fellow made some grammatical error.

"D__, D__ ," Marvin exclaimed, explaining the guy's error. "It's bad enough that we've had to listen to you drone on and on with that meaningless theory of yours. But the English language! Have you no respect for the English language?"

On the cab ride back to the Village, Marvin looked at me. "Cut the crap, Bankman. You wouldn't leave Stanford for this."

I later learned that the next day Marvin went to the Dean and reported that his colleagues had behaved very badly the night before.

3. A fellow student continually spoke in class, making what were in fact smart comments in a hesitant, annoying tone. One day he raised his hand and said "I guess what is bothering me about the decision is..."

At that point Chirelstein interrupted him. "Talk like a man, C___," he said. "Say, I think. I A_, C___, think, I A__ C__, think."

At that point, to his great credit, C nodded and said "I A__ C__ think." The class roared with approval.

The subject of shareholder voting came up in corporate finance one day. Chirelstein opined that shareholder voting was like regular voting - your vote would never decide anything. "I never vote," he said, "it's not worth the time."

"Oh, I know what you're thinking," he said a minute later, as he saw our shocked expressions. "What if everybody acted like me?"

About Me

I am the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School. My research mainly emphasizes tax policy, government transfers, budgetary measures, social insurance, and entitlements reform. My most recent books are (1) Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax (2009) and (2) Taxes, Spending, and the U.S. Government's March Toward Bankruptcy (2006). My other books include Do Deficits Matter? (1997), When Rules Change: An Economic and Political Analysis of Transition Relief and Retroactivity (2000), Making Sense of Social Security Reform (2000), Who Should Pay for Medicare? (2004), Taxes, Spending, and the U.S. Government's March Towards Bankruptcy (2006), Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax (2009), and Fixing the U.S. International Tax Rules (forthcoming). I am also the author of a novel, Getting It. I am married with two children (boys aged 24 and 21) as well as three cats. For my wife Pat's quilting blog, see Patwig’s Blog.